Recovery.gov - Track the Money

SSA believes we have a moral imperative to provide quality, timely services to the public.

It is a challenge to meet this objective because of the significant growth in our workloads, due in part to the economic downturn and baby boomer retirements. This fiscal year, we expect to receive over 300,000 more retirement claims, about a 9 percent increase, and 300,000 more disability claims, about a 12 percent increase, over last year. The Recovery Act funding will help SSA begin to lay the foundation for addressing this challenge.

For FY 2009, the Recovery Act funding will enable us to put significant front-line hires in place to address our growing critical workloads. Specifically:

•Our disability and retirement operations will hire 1,530 new employees in local field offices, tele-service centers and processing centers and 300 new employees in the State Disability Determination Service centers (approximately $105 million);

•Hearings offices will hire 550 support staff as well as 35 additional administrative law judges. This staff will be spread across the country to provide relief to those offices most in need (approximately $30 million); and

•We will invest approximately $16 million in information technology that directly supports our workload processing.

For FY 2010, the Recovery Act funding will enable us to continue to pay the salaries and benefits of the front-line hires made in FY 2009. These increases in staff will help facilitate workload processing in terms of case preparation and completion. This will also allow for additional interviews, whether in person or by telephone and will help SSA keep up with inquiries to the National 800 Number network. We intend to spend $24 million to contract with the health care community to provide us with electronic health records to improve the speed and accuracy of our disability determination process.

In addition, Recovery Act funding will allow for additional overtime resources in FY 2009 and FY 2010. In FY 2009 approximately 37% of these funds will be used to provide overtime to process additional workloads. In FY 2010 approximately 16% of these funds will be used to provide overtime.

As SSA builds on existing processes to implement the activities in this plan, we will utilize established review and evaluation programs to assess risks and ensure adequate controls have been effectively implemented. Three of the major monitoring programs are the Financial Management System (FMS) Review Program, the Management Control Review (MCR) Program, and the internal control testing required by OMB Circular A-123, Appendix A. The FMS Review Program identifies risks to SSA’s programmatic and financial systems and tests the controls in place to mitigate these risks. The MCR Program ensures SSA’s front line operations comply with SSA’s operational, security and administrative policies. The OMB Circular A-123, Appendix A program ensures the controls supporting SSA’s financial reporting processes are working properly. All three of these review programs will provide periodic recommendations and evaluations that determine if controls can be improved and the agency’s Senior Accountable Official will monitor these programs to ensure corrective action is taken.

Although SSA will develop mechanisms to separately track the spending of Recovery Act dollars, these workloads will be processed in the same manner as other disability and retirement workloads. Therefore, SSA can leverage the risk assessments and control testing programs discussed above to ensure these funds are accounted for appropriately.

SSA also will monitor the overall progress in achieving the objectives of this program plan through the oversight and leadership of our Senior Accountable Official. The Senior Accountable Official will work with the SSA executives who have the lead responsibility for the planning and execution of the program plan. We have set up an infrastructure of periodic status meetings at both the executive and staff levels to discuss the status of implementation efforts to date and future issues that may arise. We will monitor the progress in achieving the performance targets in these status meetings.

The Recovery Act funding will be used primarily for hiring and overtime and therefore, recipient level data is not applicable.

The funding is being used for labor costs. These funds are not related to Federal infrastructure investments.